John Banville, and his work, would
seem to be out of favour at the moment, especially
among the young. (That is the first time I’ve
written that collective noun, and not felt that it
somehow included me.) Even when it is only the work
that is criticised negatively, one cannot help but
feel that this is mostly a consequence of the behaviour
of the author, or of a dislike of the persona he chooses
to project publicly, rather than simply a comment
on the work itself. The smartest kid on the block
isn’t going to make himself very popular with
his peers if he doesn’t come out to play sometimes,
i.e. hold forth - on the national airwaves in preference
to in the print medium - on nationalism, revisionism,
post-colonialism, feminism, or whatever other -ism
is in fashion that season. But, as any genuine artist
knows, none of these abstract concepts has very much
to do with making works of art. They come afterwards,
if at all, rather than being starting points for writing
fiction or painting pictures. Not that there haven’t
been excellent politically engage writers and artists.
Picasso’s Guernica and Orwell’s 1984 spring
to mind, as works reacting to actual historical events
or commenting on specific political and social tendencies,
although neither of them are directly representational.
On the other hand, the work of Nadine Gordimer illustrates
that the even the Nobel Prize for Literature isn’t
always awarded on the basis of excellence of prose
style. But, for me, art comes out of art and imagination,
just as much, if not more so, as it comes from life
and experience; and form, style and expression are
just as important, if not more so, as theme, subject
matter and content. One doesn’t conceal the
other, it contains it. Trouble is, deflationary Dublin
wit is so all-pervasive (slagging, as it’s called
in the local parlance), and everyone is so worried
about being accused of being ‘pretentious’
these days, and art is increasingly being made to
earn its keep by serving some social function or other,
plus all Ireland is such a goldfish bowl, that it
is proving increasingly difficult for artists to maintain
their independence and not to get drawn into such
debates. It makes for good copy, after all, and does
raise the personal profile. However, Joyce and Beckett
managed to concentrate on their art, rather than letting
themselves get co-opted into movements, even if they
did have to get out of the goldfish bowl to do it.
Now, they’re the best ‘Irish’ writers
that ever chanced to pop into the world on this tiny
island, right? So maybe we should appreciate someone
who is trying to follow their lead, while at the same
time making it even more difficult for himself by
remaining in that transparent glass bowl.

The backlash against Banville runs
deeper than his perceived aloofness and indifference
to matters local and national, though. He is at the
receiving end of a type of criticism that has been levelled
against another formally rigorous and fastidiously inventive
word-conjurer, poet Paul Muldoon, by no less an influential
personage than Harvard academic and critic Helen Vendler,
specifically that: ‘There is a hole at the heart
of the poem, where the feeling should be’. There
is a feeling abroad that Banville is more concerned
with how the words bump up against each other, at the
expense of any emotion they might convey while doing
so. In short, he is ‘too clever’ for his
own good. To argue thus is a variation on the ‘inarticulacy
as badge of sincerity’ pose, as patented by actors
like James Dean, and stretching back in American letters
to Hemingway, and beyond. But all poetry and prose are
made primarily of words, before they are made of ideas,
plot, character, emotion, or anything else. There is
a necessary insincerity involved in making art, which
can embrace both articulacy and inarticulacy. That’s
what makes art sincere. Besides, just because some writing
doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, doesn’t
necessarily mean it doesn’t have a heart.
It would be foolish to think John Banville is not aware
of these apparent shortcomings as applied to his work.
In Eclipse, his latest in a long line of central characters
who are alienated outsiders, Alexander Cleave - who,
as his name suggests, both clings to and violently breaks
away from his past, from life, from himself - tells
us:

"It is at moments such as this,
fraught and uncertain, that I understand myself least,
seem a farrago of delusions, false desires, fantastical
misconceptions, all muted and made manageable by some
sort of natural anaesthetic, an endorphin that soothes
not the nerves but the emotions. Is it possible I have
lived all my life in this state? Is it possible to be
in pain without suffering? Do people look at me and
detect a slight peculiarity in my bearing, as one notices
the stiff jaw and faintly drooping eye of a person lately
risen from the dentist’s chair? But no, what has
been done to me is deeper than dentistry. I am a heart
patient. There may even be a name for my complaint.
‘Mr Cleave, harrumph harrumph, I’m afraid
it’s what we doctors call anaesthesia cordis,
and the prognosis is not good.’"

(I can just hear the average waggish
Dublin wiseacre, on being quoted the above passage,
making a hole in his pint and inquiring of the bar:
‘Who does his think he is, Vladimir Nabokov?’
It’s all right to have a mandarin prose style
if you’re not Irish, or if you’re dead,
or preferably both, just as it’s okay to write
in French if you go live in Paris, or are dead, or preferably
both.) Do not think I am naively confusing the writer
and his creation. ‘Conflate’ would be a
better word, although not exactly the right one either.
For, as with Beckett, and with Warhol, the authority
for the supposed effacement of the author’s voice
in Banville is none other than the author’s voice
itself. In the interplay between author and character,
autobiography and fiction, face and mask, there is room
for much slight of hand and self-reflexive metaphysical
topspin.
It’s all heightened a bit more this time though,
because Alex is not an historian, a mathematician, a
murderer, or even a spy. No, he’s an actor. Worse
still, he’s an actor who has corpsed on stage,
whose mask has fallen. If Banville the writer is only
acting (and even that’s a highly ambiguous verb),
Alex is in many ways his ideal fictional alter ego.
After his fall from grace, Alex retreats to his childhood
home, abandoning his wife Lydia for the time being,
and lives reclusively, brooding about his past, particularly
his troubled daughter Cass. In the house he meets Quirke,
a local solicitor’s clerk, and his daughter Lily,
and later discovers that they have taken up residence.
He is also haunted by ghostly apparitions, indeed the
amorphous Ghosts is his previous novel that this one
most resembles.
Some other reviewers have declared themselves stumped
when it comes to saying what Eclipse is actually about.
But, apart from touching on traditional Irish themes
such as the burden of the past and the presence of ghosts,
this novel is ultimately about the nature of consciousness
itself, or more exactly, self-consciousness. I was continually
reminded while reading this of one of E. M. Cioran’s
aphorisms: ‘We should have been excused from lugging
a body; the burden of the self was enough.’

"When the collapse came, I was
the only one who was not surprised. For months I had
been beset by bouts of crippling self-consciousness.
I would involuntarily fix on a bit of myself, a finger,
a foot, and gape at it in a kind of horror, paralysed,
unable to understand how it made its movements, what
force was guiding it. In the street I would catch sight
of my reflection in a shop window, skulking along with
head down and shoulders up and my elbows pressed into
my sides, like a felon bearing a body away, and I would
falter, and almost fall, breathless as if from a blow,
overwhelmed by the inescapable predicament of being
what I was. It was this at last that took me by the
throat on stage that night and throttled the words as
I was speaking them, this hideous awareness, this insupportable
excess of self.

Although Alex writes elsewhere of taking
‘my place in the lower ranks of the high consistory
of which she was an adept of long standing’, the
above passage is enough to make you wonder who was madder,
him or his daughter Cass. The final act of this tragedy
(and this is a five-part book that echoes the classical
five acts of drama), presses this question home even
further. He has been a neglectful father, so wrapped
up in himself that he has not noticed that Cass may
well have been a notable scholar: ‘...I should
have paid more attention to what I always winced at
when I heard her refer to it as her work. I could never
believe it was anything more than an elaborate pastime,
like thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, or Chinese patience,
something dull but demanding that would soothe her frantic
mind.’
Ironies abound, not least of which is the fact that
the line Alex fluffed, ‘Who if not I, then, is
Amphitryon?’, from Moliere’s Amphitryon,
concerns loss of identity. The story goes that Zeus
assumed the likeness of Amphitryon, in order to visit
his wife Alcmena, and gave a banquet; but Amphitryon
came home and claimed the honour of being master of
the house. However, as far as the servants and guests
were concerned, ‘The real Amphitryon is the Amphitryon
who provides the feast’. Also check out Alex’s
and Lydia’s subtly rendered almost diametrically
opposed versions of Alex’s life, on p.141.
There are some echoes of Banville’s previous books,
for example the aforementioned phantoms put one in mind
of Ghosts, while Alex’s confession that he is
a secret stalker is reminiscent of the passage in The
Book of Evidence where Freddie starts following people
in the street, plus a circus comes to town here, just
like it did in Birchwood.
If I have any criticisms of Eclipse they are that there
are perhaps too many similarities to Beckett’s
prose style and, as a corollary, to his worldview: ‘If
the lodgers led unreal lives, so too did we, the permanent
inhabitants, so called.’(p 49) and ‘How
intricate they are, human relations, so called.’
(p 140), both echo ‘...my so-called virile member...’
and ‘...the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse.’
from Molloy. Then there’s the long paragraphs,
of course, and the sparse dialogue. It is also worth
hinting that perhaps it might be time for a change of
style and perspective for Banville. Since the end of
his ‘science’ tetralogy, we have had a series
of five novels (the first three of which form a loose
trilogy themselves), all first person narratives by
broadly similar characters in fairly similar circumstances.
He may be trying to get more purity and intensity, but
maybe another big panoramic novel like Doctor Copernicus
or Kepler would not go amiss, or alternatively a novel
narrated by a less disenchanted central character.
In short, for unashamed Banville fans like me, who have
read all his previous books, this is more of the same,
and they will be very pleased with getting their fix.
On the other hand, it is not going to answer any of
those callow criticisms (some of them emanating from,
of all places, the local campuses) about his aestheticism
and elitism, of the order of ‘Banville never went
to university, and we’ve all been suffering ever
since.’, or ‘It’s all only words,
he doesn’t really mean it.’, or ‘He’s
more concerned with structure than character’,
or (the kiss of death) ‘He’s a writer’s
writer’. But from the perspective of someone who
is just beginning to call themselves a writer, it seems
to me that in terms of both quantity and quality, the
competition is still only biting on his dust.